Jessica A. Johnson commentary: Nonviolent offenders regaining the right to vote in Virginia

Saturday

Jun 29, 2013 at 12:01 AMJun 29, 2013 at 11:15 AM

Toward the end of May, Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell took another momentous step in his valiant efforts to restore the right to vote for nonviolent felons in his state. Effective July 15, his administration will remove the two-year waiting period and the application process for nonviolent felons in good standing.

Toward the end of May, Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell took another momentous step in his valiant efforts to restore the right to vote for nonviolent felons in his state. Effective July 15, his administration will remove the two-year waiting period and the application process for nonviolent felons in good standing.

McDonnell, a Republican, has been praised by the NAACP and African-American leaders for his diligence in working to reinstate the franchise to those who have served their time. Although McDonnell’s proposals have bipartisan support, they been harshly contested by some members of his own party. When he attempted to amend Virginia’s constitution so voting rights could be restored immediately to nonviolent offenders after they've completed their sentences, it was rejected by Republicans in the House of Delegates.

Virginia, along with fellow southern states Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, has more than 7 percent of its adult population disenfranchised due to felony convictions, according to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for criminal justice.

It is estimated that McDonnell’s July 15 administrative process could restore voting rights to more than 100,000 Virginians, many of them African-Americans. This is significant, given that state disenfranchisement laws due to felonies have disproportionately affected blacks in the South.

Many of these laws were passed shortly after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. For example, my home state of Georgia passed its first felon disenfranchisement law in 1868, the same year the 14th Amendment was ratified. Voting restrictions based on felonies were tactics used by racist Southern lawmakers during this tense period to keep blacks from the ballot box. Other well known discriminatory voting barriers such as grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests would be implemented during the Jim Crow era to lock blacks out of the electorate for decades until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The uphill battle that McDonnell has been fighting to restore voting rights to nonviolent felons has its roots in the early 1980s, when mandatory-minimum sentencing laws were adopted during the War on Drugs. While the War on Drugs was launched as a get-tough policy on crime by the Nixon administration, the result has led to a surge of those who are guilty of drug offenses, many of them low-level, in the prison population.

Legal scholars have defined the prison boom as the age of mass incarceration, and this has hit African-American and other minority communities especially hard. African-Americans comprise more than half of Virginia’s state inmates and close to 40 percent of people in the nation’s federal or state prisons, so it is no surprise that felon-disenfranchisement laws have played a key role in suppressing their vote once they re-enter society.

McDonnell has taken a bold step in helping nonviolent offenders regain one of the most fundamental rights of citizenship. In speeches, he often has talked about redemption and second chances for those who have been punished. Second chances have been hard to come by for many ex-felons across the nation, as our country’s laws are more severe in restricting their voting rights compared to other democracies.States have individual laws that make it extremely difficult for those released from prison to have their franchise restored, such as paying fines and court costs.

In her book The New Jim Crow, Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander calls the restoration process a “bureaucratic maze” that is “cumbersome, confusing and onerous.” McDonnell is tackling that maze, and he is trying to eliminate as many obstacles as he can to reinstate voting rights on an individual basis during his term.

Since McDonnell’s position has not been one that Republicans have championed on the national stage, his leadership on felon voting rights has made him stand out as a visionary in his party. McDonnell will continue to be lauded for his work, but what is most encouraging is that he is an elected official who has put the best interests of the people before politics.

Jessica A. Johnson is an assistant professor of English composition at Central State University and writes for the Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald.

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